The Simpson players of Jacobean Yorkshire, led by recusant
shoemakers Robert and Christopher Simpson, are known to early
modern and Shakespearean scholars for two things in particular.
Firstly, they are alleged to have staged an anti-Protestant
interlude at Gowthwaite Hall, the Yorkshire home of Sir John Yorke,
during the Christmas holidays, 1609-10; the interlude was
reportedly part of their performance of a saint's play called
St. Christopher. Secondly, the company is alleged to
have performed "Perocles, prince of Tire, And [ . . . ] King Lere"
at the same Hall around Candlemas 1610 (Star Chamber MS 8/19/10 mb.
30). Scholars have usually identified these plays with those of the
same name by Shakespeare, printed in 1609 and 1608, respectively
(although the 'Lere' could have been the earlier, anonymous
King Leir, printed in 1605). One of the players
claimed that the troupe also owned a play called The Three
Shirleys (Star Chamber MS 8/19/10 mb. 6), which is probably
another name for The Travels of the Three English
Brothers by John Day, William Rowley and George Wilkins
(printed 1607). Evidence of these alleged performances at
Gowthwaite Hall - and the allusion to the troupe's ownership of
The Three Shirleys - is preserved in the records of a
1611 Star Chamber case against Sir John Yorke, preserved in The
National Archives, London: Star Chamber MS (hereafter STAC)
8/19/10.

On the face of it a group of mainly recusant Catholic
shoemakers-turned-players, acting printed plays in one of the "dark
corners" (Hill 3) of the land, could be mistaken for
Yorkshire versions of Bottom and his fellow Mechanicals in
Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. Recent
studies of the company have challenged perceptions of the troupe as
theatrically crude and as socially, spiritually and politically
marginal, emphasising instead their possible role, and the role of
communal drama more generally, in fostering recusant Catholic
culture in the north of England, and the players' connections with
powerful figures within that culture, such as Sir Richard Cholmley
of Whitby and Sir John Yorke of Nidderdale (see, for example,
Jensen, Whitfield White, and Wilson).

Cholmley, who was a suspected closet Catholic with a record of
political dissent, having been implicated in the Earl of Essex's
rebellion in 1601, was accused in 1609 of patronising and
protecting the Simpson players in their performance of "popish"
plays (STAC, 8/12/11 mb. 2). Although there is no evidence to
support this claim and Cholmley himself denied that he was the
players' patron (STAC 8/12/11, mb. 1), he did watch them perform
and may have protected them from arrest, as did other hosts. The
same appears to have been true of Yorke, another probable closet
Catholic. In 1611 local puritan justice Sir Stephen Procter brought
the Star Chamber case against Yorke which is the source of our
information about the Simpsons' performances at Gowthwaite Hall.
Procter accused Yorke not only of hosting a performance of the
Simpsons' St. Christopher play and its controversial
anti-Protestant interlude (in which a priest defeated a minister in
a religious debate), but of harbouring priests and involvement in
the 1605 Gunpowder plot against King James I. Although the more
serious charges were later dropped on the grounds of insufficient
evidence, it is clear that Yorke and his family had a vexed
relationship with the established church and state and were engaged
in some level of resistance to it throughout the Stuart era.

However indirect their relations with such influential Yorkshire
men, in performing in their houses, the Simpsons were clearly
moving in circles that were far from marginal either socially or
politically, while their performance of at least one "popish" play
and their engagement in satire of the established church shows that
their role within northern Catholic culture was not a passive one.
Phebe Jensen has recently argued that "play-hosting and performing
could be a way of creating and sustaining recusant identity"
(Religion 46), reading such performances as a kind
"replacement for forbidden communal religious rituals",
particularly in the case of St. Christopher "where the
entertainment represents the administration of a sacrament"
("Recusancy" 111). The troupe's performance of plays such as
The Travels...

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